A major outage which impacted much of the internet on Tuesday has been blamed on a software bug.

Fastly, which took responsibility for the outage, said that the internet blackout was due to an undiscovered bug that surfaced when it was triggered by a "valid customer configuration change."

The outage temporarily pushed high-profile websites like Amazon, Reddit, and PayPal offline.

Other websites including gov.uk, BBC.com, Shopify, HBO Max, Vimeo, Hulu, CNN, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and the New York Times were also impacted by the shut down.

The issue began at about 11am BST and lasted for an hour.

The American cloud computing company “detected the disruption within one minute” and then identified and isolated the cause, then disabling the configuration.

“Within 49 minutes, 95 per cent of our network was operating as normal,” said Nick Rockwell, senior vice president of engineering and infrastructure. “This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.”

Fastly said that in the short term it is deploying the bug fix across its network, conducting a “complete post mortem” of the processes and practices followed during the incident, figuring out why the company didn’t detect the bug during the software quality assurance and testing processes, and evaluating ways to improve its remediation time.

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